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The Incredible Shrinking St. Mickey’s

The high, holy days of the Church of Baseball are fast upon us, and not one moment too soon. For those hoping for a similar rapture in the new Church of McDonald’s, prepare to be disappointed.

Not myself a follower of the secret sauce liturgy, I have yet observed, as all of us have, how often and how eagerly the congregants, mostly elderly with a sprinkling of working men surveying the day before them, flock to St. Mickey’s.

But now the tables do not move, although the chairs—small consolation!!—still do. The openness of the former eating space has been destroyed by post-modern dividers and sub-dividers. It may be a more “efficient eating experience,” but someone has severed the cord between the spiritual and the nutritional here, unwittingly, stupidly. Or more likely, calculatedly.

The food may taste better than ever, but someone at Corporate has decided there is a lot more profit in the Big Mac Meal than in the 50c senior coffee.

Maybe Daylight Donuts will inherit what St. Mickey’s must surely be forfeiting: the faithful congregants who rearrange the cheap restaurant furniture in covenant-extending groups living once again their golden lives.

Some imagined that Joni Mitchell’s lyric in “Big Yellow Taxi” somehow summarized the entire decade of the 1960s: “They paved paradise … put up a parking lot.” And it is true. Some of the formerly capacious central and unpartitioned dining room has been sacrificed to the gods of asphalt.

A St. Mickey’s acolyte I am not. But I would rise up in protest if my friends could only scratch their heads and say “where do we go now?”

The vaunted double-drive-thru may satisfy what gnaws at the stomach. The spirit, however, may go hungry.